Talk:Ambrose Jakis/@comment-23.113.94.94-20150519204212
I don't think Ambrose is responsible for the attack on Kvothe in NoTW (the pair of thugs with the finder). Before the assassination attempt, Ambrose's methods are fairly indirect, petty cruelties -- possibly breaking lute strings with sympathy, charges of "Conduct Unbecoming," buying inns and spreading rumors, and verbal sparring. Then we have the hired thugs, which is attempted murder aided by malfeasance -- fairly extreme. Then Ambrose goes back to petty cruelties, breaking Kvothe's lute, more charges, giving him a Plum Bob, and reporting his calling of the wind to the city authorities? It just doesn't make sense for Ambrose to escalate to murder so suddenly and without warning, and then descend back into pettiness again. Sure, there's the incident with the gram in WMF, where we see that Ambrose isn't above a little malfeasance and attempted murder, but he didn't know Kvothe was the target (he thinks it's some faceless burglar). I think if Ambrose wanted to kill Kvothe, he wouldn't take a multi-term break from it and go back to screwing around with insults and expulsion attempts. I could be wrong -- Ambrose's nature could be volatile enough that he'd escalate to murder, fail, and then go back to his prior games -- but he seems like the kind of bastard who wouldn't give up easily once he decided to have someone killed. We also get a weird amount of detail from the assassins. This could be just exposition on Pat's part, but it seems odd to me. They "have to be sure," they've "lost him twice already," they don't want "another cock-up like in Anilin." These are professionals used to operating over the entire Commonwealth, tracking down hard-to-find targets with sympathy -- Kvothe is a poor, badly-dressed, red-headed, lute-playing student who's always in either Imre or the University. Wouldn't Ambrose just hire a couple of local thugs to take care of "that redheaded ruh bastard" if he wanted Kvothe killed or beaten? After Kvothe gets the better of the pair, one of them groans that "no good comes of meddling with these sort of folk." What does that kind of statement have to do with Ambrose? Ambrose is a rich, vindictive noble with a cruel streak -- wouldn't that be the bread and butter of your average paid thug? Possibly that was just a hyperbolic statement about University-associated people in general, but they explicitly say that they "don't know names," or "confusing descriptions," and they were surprised by Kvothe's magic, so it's logical to assume they didn't know he was an arcanist. So why would they get a bad feeling about the job going in? And how would Ambrose get a hair? We're given a thorough explanation for how he gets Kvothe's blood in book 2, but there's nothing explaining where these guys got Kvothe's hair for their finder, not even a throwaway line like "Ambrose must have found it after our argument, and given it to them with their payment" or whatever. It's only 16 y.o. Kvothe-logic attributing this to Ambrose, and we've seen how reliable that is. TL;DR -- there's a lot about this encounter that doesn't make sense to me, and I don't think Ambrose was behind it. I think this has something to do with one of the other, deeper storylines.